Revealing the fine wine collections of 'godfather of satire' Sir David Frost

Sir David Frost is a British institution, becoming famous with satirical television shows and later holding serious interviews with political leaders, most famously Richard Nixon.

David Frost reflects on his famous Nixon interview

Frost's earlier career can be traced back to his time at Cambridge, where he was secretary of the famous Footlights Drama Society, where he was a contemporary of Peter Cook. He then joined Anglia TV and was soon picked as the host for new show That Was The Week That Was.

TW3 broke new ground in comedy and became popular, and helped Frost become known in America, especially when it relaxed its sharp edge to present a tribute to the then recently assassinated John F Kennedy.

During the British television Apollo 11 coverage, he presented David Frost's Moon Party, a 10-hour show broadcast whilst Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. One of the guests, historian A J P Taylor, argued that the moon landing was being faked from a Hollywood studio.

Frost is the only person to have interviewed eight British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2010 (including Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and incumbent David Cameron) and the seven US presidents in office between 1969 and 2008.

The first of these was a series of interviews with Richard Nixon. The first episode drew 45 million viewers, the largest television audience for a political interview in history. It was later re-created as a 2006 play and then the 2008 film Frost/Nixon.

David Frost is soon to revisit the interview in a programme made for the BBC.

He held the surprising record of being Concorde's most frequent flyer during his career as a journalist, is now worth £200m and is the patron of several charities.

Frost's assets include a substantial fine wine cellar. His love of wine dates back to his Cambridge and he was recently quoted as saying:

"My education in wine was really initiated at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, where I devoted at least as much zeal to this subject as I did to my more official education in the subject of English literature."

But he began his collection of older wines after relishing a 1918 bottle of Château d'Issan at Ernies, the legendary restaurant in San Francisco.

Bottles of Chateau Mouton 1945 from the collection

Last month, he offered a part of the collection at Christie's: 81 lots from the cellar of his Chelsea house: 270 bottles, 24 half-bottles, 13 magnums, one jeroboam and one impériale.

One particularly notable offering was the first ever vintage (1853) from Château Mouton-Rothschild. The property had been called Château Brane-Mouton prior to its purchase by Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild in 1853.

In the event, the top lot was a 12 bottle set of Romanee Conti 1988, which sold for £86,250/$141,622 to an Asian private collector. In noting how strong 2011 had been so far in terms of wine sales, company director Chris Munro noted:

"We were particularly pleased with the fabulous selection of wines from the cellar of Sir David Frost which more than doubled their pre-sale estimate."